"Bri" (pictured, eyes) is a homeless blogger currently living in a car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. She wrote a letter to Elle columnist E. Jean about blowing a reality show audition, and E. Jean was so taken with her inspirational up-and-at-em go-getting can-do spirit that she offered Bri a four month telecommuting internship! It comes with this guarantee:

At the end of the four months, if you don't have a job and an awesome place to live, I will become your intern.

A media job!? In this economy! So the best part of all will be seeing an Elle columnist intern for an unemployed homeless person. But good luck to one and all!

[Let us know if we can help, Bri! Via Homeless Tales]

Luisa Borges lives in Rio and has a Twitter account with the handle "luisacb." And "Luisacb" is currently the "lucky" high bidder on the Huffpo internship "opportunity."

And there's more evidence! Luisacb is also the current high bidder—$18,000—for another item from the very same charity auction: "You'll Be Saying "Ahhhhh" When You Vist the Set of House , Meet the Entire Cast and Take Home Hugh Laurie's Signed Iconic Cane."

Well we certainly would be saying 'Ahhhh' if we swallowed such an offer, eh? More evidence: Luisa Borges, on Twitter, loves House so much that she sends Tweets to the cast members! She's a superfan! Who else would pay $18K for Hugh Laurie's fucking cane? It all makes sense!

Except the HuffPo thing. That shit is just lunacy. Luisa, please email us and explain yourself at once.

Did you wake up today around 1:30 EST in your industrial loft, pull on your favorite (and only) pair of cutoff jean shorts, and take a leisurely stroll down Bedford Avenue in search of organic green juice and the new DFA on vinyl? Do you tap the family trust fund every time you need to make rent? (or do you have to fix bikes for a living?) Does your tattoo have a story to tell? Do you jam with a hardcore band on the weekends and DJ on the weeknights? Are you cooking tofu right now for you and your seven roommates? Do you barely make it into Manhattan three days a week for "college"? Is that handlebar mustache merely for comedic effect? Do you consider 25 "old age"? Do you idolize Dan Deacon? Do you fold clothes at American Apparel? Are you SO not worried about getting swine flu 'cause that shit only happens to poor people? Were you recently the victim of the Hipster Grifter? Or even better, are you THE Hipster Grifter? And most importantly, what are you going to do this summer now that the McCarren Pool Parties are over???!!!

If you live in Williamsburg, are between the ages of 18-25, and are cool with opening your doors to a camera crew (your seven roommates will have to be cool with it too)

- Photo of yourself
- Five things that make you a hipster.
- A short description of yourself and why you want to be on the show.

This is not a competition or game show, and you will not be required to live on an island or eat worms. There is, however, a cash guarantee involved for the chosen ones.

Jesus is the actual Williamsburg not idle entertainment enough for you people? Kari, we'd recommend holding out for at least Celebrity Apprentice. This is beneath you.

[We did get an actual sighting of Kari in Williamsburg this week but the tipster was basically like "I saw her, then I immediately passed out drunk," so we can't really vouch for it.]

Not too long ago, Guzikowski was like you. Working in marketing, desperately writing screenplays in his spare time. He and his wife Allison, also a filmmaker, had their engagement profiled in the New York Observer—a cute if a bit too hipstery and Brooklyn for most to fully stomach kinda story. ("I love you... on the subway." "I love you... in the rain." Ugh.) Guzikowski has made some short films and was a competition semifinalist with a screenplay called Panacea, about a magical statue.

But now all of that is behind him, and he doesn't need to promote himself via Gotham Writers Workshop-sponsored contests or fawning wedding announcements in local papers anymore. Prisoners, about a vigilante Boston papa looking for his kidnapped daughter and her friend, was much loved in various Hollywood circles, and now all it needs is a director. So young Adam (he's in his mid 30's) is on his way. Maybe he'll become the next Shane Black! Except, you know, without that sad 10 year hiatus.

Now, it must be said that we met Roy at a party before she escaped New York, and found her perfectly pleasant. But HuffPosts like this aren't helping your cause, Jess! If New York City is not a "place for serious people," as previously alleged, then Paris is a hellhole where you can't get a decent vegetarian meal:

As a vegetarian and someone allergic to most dairy, eating food other than carbs was almost certainly out of the question. So baguettes and Nutella and lettuce heads it was. A few days in I started crying in the dairy aisle of my local grocery store when I realized I didn't know the words for "soy milk" and was too embarrassed to ask.

Fine, fine. But this line... this line should have been excised during the HuffPo's editing process (assuming they have one):

"I've found that the most difficult part of being here is the nagging inability to communicate my feelings to others in a sophisticated manner."

Us too. Unfortunately, it takes years.

"I think it’s probably tougher to make it [in New York media] now than it was 13 years ago, particularly in the print media. I don’t envy young Brits crossing the Atlantic to make their fortunes today….Probably the difference is I’d rent somewhere in Brooklyn rather than in the West Village. I probably wouldn’t be working for Vanity Fair, I’d probably be working as Nick Denton’s slave at Gawker and being paid nothing. I’d probably be sleeping on Euan Rellie’s floor."

This is uncomfortably accurate, except we do too get paid! But for the record I was sleeping at the Malibu Hotel SRO during my first few weeks in the city, not Euan Rellie's floor.

[WWD]

After the initial pleasantries were exchanged (Julia: "I thought I was off your radar. It was quite peaceful." Sheila: "It was peaceful for me, too."), Julia denied that Bravo, the network said to be producing a reality show starring the Nonsociety girls, was financing the space. But were they looking for a space that is... filmable, let's say?

"Let's put it this way," Julia said. " We need office space that is ... unique. Cameras are a part of our everyday lives, and we anticipate significant filming. I will also be living in the space. Mary may be. Meghan owns a place already so she'll simply be working there."

But what about the money? "If you look at it logically, most businesses pay about 5-6k for office space for 5-6 people, which is what we have. Add that to what I already pay for my rent ($2,500/month — Ed) and you have a financially sound decision."

So, is Nonsociety—meaning the website's investors—footing half the bill? "Yeah, but it's money we've made, not investors." But how does the website even generate revenue? It's sort of impossible. We'd go so far as to say there is no revenue yet.

Well, whatever—genius! They are about to score a sweet live-work pad (tax write-off!) and we're not. Fine, JA—you win this round.

Oh, it's about socialite Tinsley Mortimer's sister-in-law, Minnie. Minnie's brother is Paper magazine's Peter Davis. Minnie has a line of clothing to hawk:

Each of the apparel pieces in the collection is named after one of her best friends. "These are the people that I've known since I was five years old." Distance makes the heart grow weary, and the two months she will spend in her beloved Southampton is the time of the year she looks forward to the most. Stephen taught her to surf the waves in Biarritz, Mustique, and in St. Bart's, where they honeymooned, and Minnie wants to take him to Flying Point Beach, so she can share with him the coastal community that she loves more than any other in the world. She plans on staying put once she gets here and intends on visiting Manhattan only rarely. Minnie asks, "Why leave when everything I need and everyone I love is here?"

[Hamptons Style]

Make sure to build up momentum by getting progressively more caustic and revealing. Your eventual firing will be a blessing. Make sure to publicize it—the resulting news bump will add your name to the "fired for blogging about work" folder. This is also a good time to get in touch with a couple of agents, if the more Internet-savvy ones haven't called you already. Remember—you're part of a trend now.

Oh, and save IM logs. They'll serve as great notes when you're writing your book. Just remember, your boss is probably logging and saving your IM convos, too. I know mine is.

Also: dungeons and sex clubs. Your boss probably goes to one or the other. Make sure to get its name.

Be creative and think outside the box! There are all kinds of ways to screw your boss over, 2.0-style. One or two embarrassing party pics can go a long way on the blogs these days—and annoy him or her on Google Images for at least the next year.

Got any other suggestions?

Also, you definitely have to be a girl. But a girl without a criminal background.

"I found a home! I dropped off the deposit last night, so it's all on the level now. It's in Brooklyn, at the 15th St. Prospect Park stop; it's under $700 (actually a great price, but I don't want to publicize that widely). It's a great brownstone with two cool roommates, Haiyen and Lindsey.

I didn't have to look at many places, either. Here's how it went down:

My first two places: the buzzer didn't work at the first, so I stood around looking a tourist or something, wishing I had a pink cake to cry into...

Then my friend was having lunch at some restaurant, and the waiter told him that there was a room avail in his building. We saw it that night—a GORGEOUS loft in Bed-Stuy, right off the Morgan stop, I think... The rent was something that came out to just over $500 for 4 people (and we had 4 people), so I said, "We want it."

This I said in front of someone we'll call "Blustafson," a very good-looking but quiet guy sitting playing on the computer. The person leaving the apartment said that "technically it's Blustafson's call, because he's here now..." And I had to whisper, "Is that Blustafson?" I think he finally looked up at this point, and the temperature dropped 20 degrees in the room.

...The next place I looked at was a $500 room... It was also in an interesting neighborhood, right on the Nostrand stop on the A, which felt in some ways like a Caribbean version of Canal St. I went into some great sneaker store and got these awesome sneaks for $19.90. A lot of great sneakers for uner $20. Don't know how they do it—don't care.

Then I went in one of those cheap stores that sell everything, and they had deodorants that I'd never seen marketed in mainstream stores and shorts for $5 and the like. Then I went into this oil and candle shop—because I'm a scent nut—and I was looking at the large selection of oils, and I asked if I could smell them. The guy said they were "not for perfume; for special purposes." But the perfume oils, of which there were a MUCH smaller selection, were on the other shelf. I turned back to the "special purposes" oils and he reiterated his previous point, adding that they were for "religious purposes." Oh. I should have known, considering one was called "voodoo."

The next day I saw the place I got—a gorgeous brownstone on the outskirts of the Park Slope area."

1. Be a Temp Slave!

From BK_KT:
"Temping temping temping. There are agencies that specialize in media/entertainment companies, and you can get your foot in the door and prove yourself in person rather than on paper or email. I had 3 long term (several months) temp positions before being hired for the position I am in now. Granted, most offices treat temps like shit, there's no hand-holding, and you can get let off at a moment's notice."

From it takes a train to cry:
"I'll second the recommendations that you temp. Many jobs, formally or not, are temp-to-hire. Don't worry about the 20 jobs at Time Inc. that you applied for - in many cases, the person who's doing the hiring has already picked someone within the company for the job, and the posting is just a policy requirement. So, you probably never had a chance to begin with on most of them."

From Cannot Find Server:
"To reiterate: Temp. Unless you're very, very lucky, you won't get that job at the big media company right out of the gate. I did eight terrible months as a personal assistant before landing a real job at a real company with real benefits. Almost everyone has that shit job in New York their first year. Just don't get stuck in it."

2. Freelance
Because practically nobody's on staff anymore!

From sunnyciegos:
"Otherwise, as others have said, freelancing is the way to go. I was surprised to learn that few writers are on staff anywhere. That's just the nature of this very crappy industry. I eventually left to get a better-paying, more rewarding job outside the magazine industry and can freelance on my own time. It's just better this way."

From HK_Guy:
"Kid, no one in NY "applies" for a job. You freelance, you get known by the company, and you get hired. I get resumes and cover letters all the time, and most of them are so poorly written they go straight to circular."

3. Have Some Totally Important Connections Already (In Which Case You Wouldn't Even Need to Ask)
Rich parents, famous parents, parents in media... you get the picture.

From ADismalScience:
"Part of the problem is that you even have to ask. This means that you don't have the familial or interpersonal connections to fill the desks currently filled by those kids. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is all of them."

From ian spiegelman:
"Magazines are totally, totally lost to the children of the rich and connected now as far as entry level is concerned. Magazines, as this site illustrates again and again and again, are for and by rich dupes, trust-funded babies..."

4. Start a Blog

From Yazz Flute:
"CVs are for kids. Clips are currency. My first clips were from an online e-zine (which I cofounded so that I could get some clips). I used those to get an internship at a newspaper, and voila, foot was in the door."

From Nick Denton, the boss around here:
"I think the value of connections is wildly overstated. Certainly on the web. We're always looking for writers with a track record of productivity (a personal blog is just fine), flair and an area of interest. And it's even better if they don't have connections, because then we get the satisfaction of discovering them, and a little bit of gratitude before the inevitable entitlement settles in."

5. Referrals

From TheHonJudgeSmails:
"Most companies in this town, media or otherwise, won't even double-click to open your resume, unless it was submitted by someone who already works at said company. Referrals are often the ONLY way to be even considered for a job."

From LatestBy:
"Meet anyone at the company you want to work for, and with their permission drop their name like a atomic bomb in the first letter of your cover letter to HR. I got a job within two weeks of doing this."

6. Intern (Also see: Don't intern)
Oh, the time-honored internship. Better hope you can be "subsidized" or working another job while work for media-peanuts—or for nothing! Or, as Adelle Waldman says in the New Republic today: fuck that. Don't intern. Internships simply reinfornce the status quo herd mentality of the already-provincial media jungle:

For one, most journalism internships discriminate on the basis of financial wherewithal... The rule of thumb, when it comes to internships, is that only the well-heeled bother to apply. (Newspapers may be a bit exceptional in this regard, as historically they have paid more.)

The other big problem with the internship culture is that it rewards young people who know exactly what they want to do and immediately begin strategizing about how to get there. Wouldn't it make sense to do the exact opposite? That is, create incentives for people who have wider experience in the world?

There's a social good problem at play when news is delivered by people who harbor such similar ambitions and come from such similar backgrounds, people who have spent their summers in the same cities and have worked at the same types of organizations. Naturally, they are likely to keep spotting and writing about the same types of issues—and keep missing different ones. What would it be like to have more education reporters who'd spent time teaching in struggling public schools or metro reporters who'd been cops or social workers?

From xxlobster:
"The way I got my first job in book publishing was incredibly easy (but pricey): the summer after graduation I signed up to do a summer publishing course at one of the big universities in the city. Two months of classes (that I skipped out of, for the most part) and $5,000 later, I did a mock interview with a major publishing house as a part of the course, and they liked me, so they gave me a job. This happened to lots of people I know from the course. By the way, even though I'm in book publishing, it was a course for magazines too...but I'm not sure how successful the magazine people were getting jobs out of the program. But seriously, best investment ever."

From seedy:
"That is how I got my gig at a book publisher as well. I know people that used the course to segueway into mags, but most were doing non-editorial jobs like sales. I know having clips + the summer publishing program tended to work for those that wanted to write. Both Columbia and NYU have these summer publishing intensive programs."

8. Gain Experience in a Smaller "Market"
"Market" is a jargony word that scares us. We'll replace "market" with "a place that is not New York, say, San Francisco."

From ian spiegelman:
"That said, everyone who suggested starting out in a smaller market I tend to agree with. If you hit NYC fresh from college looking for media work, you're kind of screwed from the jump. Some colleges like Northwestern and NYU have—or had—cozy relationships with places like New York magazine and can hook you up with a paid internship as a fact checker or editorial assistant, but otherwise, if you you can't afford to work for free, you need clips from a smaller, out-of-town thing. I did my small-paper reporting while I was still in college as a paid reporter for the Queens Courier and that helped a lot. But I only got my paid internship at New York through a professor who was friends with Maer Roshan.

"Newspapers, however, from weekly to daily, still seek eager kids who will bust ass for a story and who can understand why they are being made to make copies and type up called-in reports from older reporters while they learn the trade. Every single town in America, and in NYC, has a local paper and all those papers have a job that pays garbage for working for the local weekly. Do that for a year and then apply to a bigger paper. You'll be amazed at how much an old Time-y newspaper will respond to a young kid with newspaper experience rather than some recent grad who wrote for a personal blog or interned at Conde Nast."

From shanghaibaby:
"Go international!

Find a place where there's a big expat population and English is not the native tongue.

I went to Shanghai and within 1.5 years I was the senior editor (by law the editor-in-chief, although not a 'working' editor, has to be a Chinese National) at the largest English entertainment magazine in the city (about 300,000, weekly.)

Now, this is by no means big by international or NY standards, but I did get to interview and meet people that otherwise I would have never have access to in NY (or any other Western city). From The Rolling Stones to Terence Koh to Giorgio Armani to Mikhail Gorvachev to Olympic Athletes.

Eventually, you'll be well connected in the small (but influential) world of expat media and you'll start getting asked to contribute for larger, foreign (US, Europe) publications who need content from wherever you are."

9. Miscellaneous Advice

From mitchel_stevens:
"-Claim you're an expert in "New Media." No one knows what the fuck it is anyway.
-Don't say "Web 2.0"
-Do say "I subscribe to [X] feeds..."
-Realize editorial assistants positions bite.
-Demand at least 30 k. they'll claim 22-28 k is good; if they do, make sure you can still "freelance" and make sure you never freelance for a website—unless they are corporately owned."

From Aaron Altman, who's not afraid to be servicey:
"From the TV news side: intern at a non-union news operation. Usually the 24-hour newsers (NY1, News 12) are just that. There you can actually do some of the stuff only union-ers usually do - handle the camera, shoot standups (!!!), conduct interviews, etc. True, it will take a while - and internships being a five- or six-month stint, there ain't much time - but you'll get there.

Work the assignment desk. If you're going in there with the hopes of going on-air, forget it. Even the "minor leagues" like NY1 - i.e., those that serve as sort of "farm teams" for the likes of WNBC, WABC etc. - have enough talent sending in resume tapes for the news director to sort through. (And the blowjobs thing that eleanor and narnio mentioned earlier? Unfortunately, in some cases, true. But DO NOT BLOW ANYONE. It's not worth it.) If they see you doing well at the desk - taking calls from tipsters and publicists, weeding through the BS until you get that kickass story you see on the air - then you'll do just fine. You MUST want to do behind-the-scenes stuff. And no, not BJ's.

Also. WRITE WELL. There is a difference between copy for papers and copy for air. KNOW who you are writing for, and you do that by watching them. Sue Simmons has a different, expletive-free voice than Pat Kiernan, who has a different voice from Steve Bartlestein, who has a different voice from Roseanna Scotto. If you aren't writing for air, then you are taking in info at the assignment desk. THIS IS CRITICAL. The quality and integrity of notes from the police department, from a tipster, yadda yadda is important in whether and how a story makes it on the air. The assignment editor, as I see it, is the central nervous system of a TV newsroom. (Empahsis, most of the time, on "nervous.")

Last but not least - you will deal with a whole buncha jerkdom at these places. DO NOT TAKE IT PERSONALLY. The good ND's, assignment managers, EP's and producers know TV news talent when they see it. They see that someone consumes the news, lives and breathes it, as a good newshound should. Here in NYC, it is not enough to know about the latest ep of Gossip Girl. You must know how to get a reporter into deep Brooklyn, or the fastest way to Hasbrouck Heights to cover a three-alarm fire, or the names of the press people in Mayor Cory Booker's office. You need to know the difference between Fairfield, CT and Bergenfield, NJ. You need to know how many bridges lead to Staten Island (three) and how many of those come to and from Jersey (two) and which one was named after the Port Authority's first chairman (the Outerbridge Crossing). You have to read Gothamist, the Times/Post/Daily News/Newsday and yes, the Sun, and listen to 880 or 1010 online. In short: BE the news. There is no better way to put it."

Whew! That's a lot of info. We're putting our noses to the grindstone—or as Allen Ginsberg said, "America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

"I interned for a cable news-parody show, did great in school, and I find that down here, doors are just slammed in my face for reasons I cannot understand. I have tried every avenue, e-mail, job websites, regular mail, knocking on doors, and now e-mailing strangers to see if anyone has any advice. Do you have any advice? It would be much appreciated."

"I also majored in journalism and political science if that's of any interest... I guess my biggest problem with the job search is these websites that all of the major media companies use, especially Time Warner. They post about 20 jobs a day, and I apply for every single one I am qualified for and I never hear a thing. Same thing with NBC. I actually followed up my online applications with a mailing of my resume and cover letter to them. Five days later I got this postcard back that told me to use their website and that they couldn't help me. It's infuriating. I think a lot of people go through college doing a great job thinking when they graduate, a job will fall in their laps. Clearly not the case."

He emerged from the Metro at the L'Enfant Plaza station and positioned himself against a wall bside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made...

My senior year at NYU, I interned at New York magazine. I asked one of their star journalists, Vanessa Grigoriadis, if she would be my mentor that semester and she generously agreed. Over dinner one night at Blue Ribbon Sushi, I explained how I hoped to one day be a journalist covering women's politics, societal and cultural issues, like her or Ariel Levy or Emily Nussbaum (or Rebecca Traister at Salon or Katha Pollitt at The Nation, etc.). "You need a strategy," Vanessa told me.

Case in point: Recently I wrote a freelance article for Bitch magazine about a sexual politics matter — easily the best article I've ever written. I labored for about four months on this piece. And I can only think of one friend who went out to buy the $6 magazine off a news stand. Every single other friend and colleague, without exception, has asked me for a link to the article — which cannot be found online. So I saw my name in print on a dead tree and I cashed a check for my months of researching, interviewing, writing and rewriting. But I'm not sure anybody's actually read it.
On second thought, maybe I do have a strategy now... It's a gun-to-your-head strategy, out of necessity, rather than choice: Stick to the web.

About the author: Sloane Crosley's debut book of humor essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, is being published this week by Riverhead Books. Her work has appeared in various publications including Playboy, Salon, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, and Black Book, where she was a contributing editor. She also wrote the cover story for the worst-selling issue of Maxim in that magazine's history.

I Am Not a Piece of Candy Twisted Symmetrically at the Ends [Esquire]

Two years ago, Page Six reported that Natalie Reid, "the world's #1 Paris Hilton impersonater," may have worked there as an escort. Former clients include the Duke of Westminster, according to News of the World. He bragged to his hired gal about "Army connections and his inside knowledge of military matters. "